Tell Me Who I Am

by Julia Navarro

  “And what if it’s a trap? What if they’re testing you to see how large the network really is so that the Stasi arrests you all?”

  “No, it’s not. Anyway, I haven’t promised him anything. I’ve just said that I’ll introduce him to a friend who may be able to help. We’ll get him out without him knowing where he’s going. By the time he realizes it, he’ll be on the other side.”

  “It’s not so easy to get to the other side.”

  “I know, but in any case he won’t know when it’s going to happen. Amelia, I think he’s being followed. His friend the writer was not discreet with his criticisms of the regime, even though he did so in restricted circles, but you know that the Stasi has eyes and ears everywhere.”

  “I’ll think about it.”

  Amelia was upset to think about going back on what she had said to the journalist, that she would never again work for any secret service. After going over it many times, she came to an agreement with Albert and with her own conscience.

  “I will not be paid a pfennig for getting people out of East Berlin. I will do it when I want, and I will direct each operation myself, from deciding the day and the hour down to choosing the people who will work with me.”

  Albert tired to convince her to accept at least some payment, but she refused, flat out.

  After helping the Central Committee bureaucrat cross over, other men went out through our basement. This went on until Amelia decided to close this escape route after a visit from Vasiliev.

  I think it was at the beginning of the seventies that Ivan told us he was going back to Moscow.

  He had turned up unannounced, laden with bags filled with farewell presents.

  Two bottles of cognac for Max, a bottle of vodka, olive oil, soft soap, butter, jam, jeans for me... It was like Grandfather Frost bringing his New Year’s gifts.

  “I’ve come to say goodbye, I’m going back to Moscow.”

  We asked him, worried, what had happened to make him return.

  “It’s age, my friends, I have to retire.”

  “But why? You’re still young!” Amelia said.

  “No, I’m not, I’m going to be seventy-five, it’s time to rest. I should have gone back years ago.”

  “Comrade Brezhnev is no spring chicken either,” I said, upset that Ivan Vasiliev was leaving. I had grown to like him, even though he was in the KGB.

  “Ah, my dear Friedrich! Politicians are not subject to the same laws as the rest of mankind. Our leader is at his zenith; after Nikolai Podgorny’s removal, he is the first leader to be head of state and general secretary of the party at the same time. All power is in his hands. I hope to be back in Moscow to celebrate the sixtieth anniversary of the revolution. They say that Comrade Brezhnev is preparing a truly extraordinary celebration.”

  He played his last game of chess with Max, as was his habit, and praised Amelia’s tortilla. After we had eaten and were each drinking a glass of vodka, he looked at Amelia.

  “You know what? Our friends in the Stasi are worried about some of the recent escapes to the West. They’re wondering about possible escape routes that they have not discovered, which the Americans are using to get traitors out of the city. There’s a young major who thinks he knows what’s happening. Maybe he does, maybe he doesn’t. Young people are so ambitious, but even so they sometimes get things right. You know what he thinks? That they are using the sewers to smuggle people out. Imagine that. So they are going to put them under guard day and night until they have found out if the major is right. Do you know how the major has managed to come to such a conclusion? I’ll tell you: There’s a popular journalist, a German, who has discovered, reading between the lines, that there has to be a very effective escape route between the two Berlins that has only one problem: the smell. We found out years ago that it’s not necessary to have too many agents in the West, all you have to do is read their newspapers. The Western journalists think that their sacrosanct obligation is to tell people everything they know. And I’m grateful to them. Anyway, they’ll find this foul-smelling secret passage very soon, if it exists. If it were up to me, I think that I could have flushed out this rat a long time ago. But our friends in the Stasi are self-sufficient, they accept our advice and our collaboration but they don’t need us. They’re the best spy service in the world... with the exception of the KGB, of course. But the truth is that Germany is a good platform for us to have, a springboard to the rest of the world. That’s not a secret to anyone, don’t you think?”

  “Do you really think you could have caught that rat?” Amelia said, making me nervous.

  “Of course, but sometimes our friends are too proud and don’t want us to stick our noses into their business. Although I think that this major is going to start taking the steps I would have taken myself.”

  “And what would you have done with the rat?” Amelia asked.

  Ivan stretched out his hand and then made it into a fist, before bursting into laughter.

  “My dear Amelia, in this game it is the duty of the rat to try to avoid the cat, and the duty of the cat to try to eat the rat. Both of them know it, it’s the reason they exist. Yes, I would have eaten the rat.”

  “Whoever the rat turned out to be?”

  They looked at each other for a few seconds. Amelia held Ivan Vasiliev’s cool gaze, waiting for him to reply.

  “Yes.”

  “I understand.”

  I had sat stock-still, terrified by the direction the conversation had taken. I didn’t understand what Amelia was doing. My father also looked at her in surprise.

  “You’re still a good Communist.”

  “I never stopped being one.”

  “In spite of Stalin?”

  “He made mistakes, he persecuted innocent people, but he made Russia great, and he’ll be remembered for that.”

  “And for his crimes, Ivan, and for his crimes.”

  “Not even he managed to make me stop believing that Communism is the truth.”

  Ivan Vasiliev said goodbye to us affectionately. I think that he really felt that this was a permanent separation.

  “I didn’t understand that little duel you had with him about the cat and the rat.” Max was asking for an explanation.

  “It wasn’t a duel, just idle curiosity.”

  “It was as if... I don’t know, as if one of you were the rat and the other was the cat... I didn’t like it... I don’t know...” Max was worried.

  “You don’t need to worry, it was just a game.”

  “And the sewers... I couldn’t help but remember that you got into the Warsaw ghetto through the sewers, so it’s not a crazy idea to think that someone else might have come up with the same plan.”

  After we had got Max to bed, I made a sign to Amelia for us to go and talk in the kitchen.

  “Do you think he knows something?” I asked, nervous.

  “Maybe he does, yes, or maybe he’s only suspicious.”

  “But he said that he wouldn’t have hesitated to put an end to whoever it was who was taking people out through the sewers.”

  “Yes, he would have, and it would have been his right to do so.”

  “Even if it were you...”

  “Yes, of course. He has to do his duty, just as we have to do ours. Everyone works according to their own principles.”

  “I was terrified... I don’t understand how you could have had that sort of conversation with him.”

  “It was something that we both had to say to each other. You know what? I’m going to miss him a lot.”

  Amelia spoke to Garin to tell him that she would never use our basement again as a way into the sewers.

  “It’s over, or else they’ll discover us. Friedrich is going to cover up the hole in our basement that went through to the sewers. I’m sorry, but I’m not going to put my family in danger.”

  Albert James had no option but to accept Amelia’s decision; in any event, he didn’t have strength to fight with her. He had been diagnosed with lun
g cancer, and he was retiring.

  He came to our house one afternoon. When we heard the doorbell we couldn’t imagine who it might be.

  He was dressed as a Lutheran pastor, and wore a wig that covered most of his forehead. I opened the door and stood stock-still, not knowing who it was.

  He asked my father and me to let him speak to Amelia alone. I took my father to his room and shut the door, but I left my door ajar. I couldn’t bear not to hear what he had to say to Amelia.

  He described his illness, the sharp burning pain in his chest, and he said that the doctors were not optimistic about how much time he had left.

  “I don’t know if it will be years or months, but whatever time I have left I want to spend with Lady Mary.”

  “Lady Mary?”

  “My wife.”

  Amelia was silent for a few seconds.

  “You didn’t tell me about her... I didn’t know you were married.”

  “I didn’t tell you, why should I have? Your life and mine took different paths. I should thank you for having left me for Max. I don’t know if I’d have been able to deal with everything I’ve done here without Mary’s support. She gives me strength, and before every operation, every dangerous action, she said that it had to go well so that I could come back to her.

  “Your parents must be happy, it’s what they wanted for you.”

  “And they were right. You and I would never have been happy, and not just because you didn’t love me enough.”

  “You know something? I’ve wanted to ask you this for years now: What made you change so much?”

  “The war, Amelia, the war. You were right, it’s impossible to be neutral, I admitted as much to you a few years ago when we met after the war. I got involved in this, and when I wanted to step away from it, I couldn’t, and I realized that I shouldn’t either.”

  “And you’ve come to say goodbye...”

  “We’ve worked together all these years, but our relationship has been tense, as if we were confronting each other about something. I’ve never known why. You were with Max and I was with Mary, we’d both of us made our choice, and even so we weren’t able to be friends. Now that I know my death is close I don’t want to go without reconciling myself with you. You were very important in my life, before I married Mary, you were the woman I had loved the most and I thought that it would be impossible to love anyone the way I loved you. Then I found a superior kind of love, a different kind of love, and I was grateful to you for having abandoned me. But you are a part of my life, Amelia, I cannot tell my story without you being a part of it, and I need to reconcile myself with you in order to be able to die at peace with myself.”

  They embraced. In each other’s arms, Amelia was crying and it was clear that Albert was making a great effort to hold back his tears.

  “We’re older now, Amelia, it’s time for us to rest. You should rest too and... I know I shouldn’t say anything, but haven’t you ever thought of going back to Spain to be with your family?”

  “Not a single day goes by when I don’t think about my son, my sister, my uncle, my aunt, Laura... But there’s no turning back. The day I left with Pierre... That day put an end to the best things about me. Of course I miss them now, Javier will be a man, he’ll be married, he’ll have children and he will have asked himself why I abandoned him...”

  “If you want, I could try to get you out of here; it would be dangerous, but we could try.”

  “No, I’ll never leave Max, never.

  “You have sacrificed your life for him.”

  “I took his life, it’s only fair that he should have mine.”

  “Don’t carry on blaming yourself for what happened in Athens, you didn’t know that Max was traveling with that convoy, it wasn’t your fault.”

  “I set off the detonator, it was I who set off the detonator as he came past.”

  “There are innocent victims in any way; thousands upon thousands of them, men and women, who have lost their lives. At least Max is alive.”

  “Alive? No, you know he died that day. I took his life from him. How can you say that he’s alive? He’s stuck in that chair, he can’t leave his room. He hasn’t got any family left, and he didn’t want us to look for any of his old friends. I know that most of them will be dead, but maybe someone is left... But he didn’t want to, he didn’t want anyone from his past to see him reduced to a lump of meat in a wheelchair. And it was I who put him in that wheelchair.”

  Amelia went to get my father so that he could say goodbye to Albert, and then called me. I made an effort not to show my feelings. I was in a state of shock: I had just found out that Amelia had caused my father to be in his current state. I knew that he had lost his legs in an act of sabotage carried out by the Greek Resistance, but it was not until now that I found out that the person who had set off the detonator had been Amelia.

  It was hard for me to shake Albert’s hand to wish him farewell. When he had left I shut myself in my room and gave way to tears. I hated her, I hated her with all my soul, and I loved her, I loved her with all my soul, and I hated myself for loving her.

  4

  I made a decision. I had finished my studies some time ago and I was working as a doctor in a Berlin hospital. Over those years I had established my relationship with Ilse, who insisted that we should marry, or at least go live together. I had resisted because it seemed to me that leaving Amelia and Max would be like a desertion. He was an invalid whose health worsened by the day, and Amelia gave him every moment of her life. Until that night I had thought that it was a boundless love that tied them together, but now I knew that what connected them was something even stronger and more painful than love.

  Ilse had stopped living with her parents some time ago, and I decided to go to her house that very night. I found a couple of bags and put some clothes in them. I left the house without making any noise.

  The next day I went with Ilse to get the rest of my things. My father didn’t understand why I’d made such a sudden decision.

  “It’s a good idea, but to do it like that... without saying anything,” he said, regretfully.

  “Either I should do it like this, or I’ll never be able to leave.”

  “Friedrich has the right to look for his own way through life, to have his own life. We’ve been lucky to have him with us for more time than we could have imagined,” Amelia said. “But we will miss you.”

  I didn’t say that I would miss them too, because at the moment I needed to get away.

  “We’ll come often enough, won’t we, Ilse?”

  “Of course we will. Anyway, my apartment isn’t too far away from here, it’s not more than half an hour’s walk.”

  But my visits grew ever more spread out and I felt guilty because of it. I needed to find myself, put my feelings in order. I knew that my father was suffering because I didn’t go to see him, and that this was affecting his health, but I couldn’t change the way I felt. Even when our first child was born, I didn’t do anything to help my father enjoy being a grandfather.

  One night, Amelia called me in alarm. Apparently, my father had suffered an attack and he wanted to see me as soon as possible.

  When I got there I thought he was dying, he was having a heart attack, but we got him to the hospital in time.

  My colleagues in the cardiology department had told me that there wasn’t a great deal of hope, but they didn’t bank on my father’s desire to carry on living. He was in hospital for a month before they let him go home. From this moment on I decided that I wouldn’t let him suffer more than I had suffered, and I made it my habit to pass by their house every evening on my way home after I left the hospital.

  My relationship with Amelia had changed since that night when I heard her talk with Albert, and I was somehow annoyed that this change was not something she condemned, or felt offended by. She accepted it, as she accepted everything that happened to her over the course of her life.

  My father was extremely happy that Ilse
and I started to bring the children round more frequently. He liked reading them stories and teaching them to play chess. Amelia was the very best of grandmothers. But she was something more than a peaceable old lady.

  Ilse worked in a research institute, and some of her fellow scientists were opposed to the regime. She knew of and sympathized with many of the members of the opposition, but she kept herself distant from their activities.

  Until one day, when she found herself caught up in a situation.

  It was early one morning, because Ilse always liked to arrive before the rest of her colleagues, she said that in this way she was able to organize her day. She thought that she was alone, but then one of her colleagues came into the room.

  “Hello Erich, what are you doing here so early?”

  He didn’t reply, but fell to the floor in a faint. Ilse was scared, went up to him, and saw that he was bleeding. She sat him up as best she could and tried to rouse him.

  “Don’t tell anyone,” he said in a faint voice.

  “You’re wounded, you need a doctor.”

  “Please, don’t call anyone!”

  “But...”

  “Please! Help me to hide, I’m begging you!”

  She felt nervous, and didn’t know what to do. She thought about telephoning me at the hospital, but she knew that the telephones were all tapped and that if she told me to come straight away then it would arouse suspicions.

  Without knowing how she managed, Ilse got Erich to a storeroom.

  “I’ll have to find someone who will help us to get you out of here. Can you tell me what happened?”